“But throwing out people who have been here for 10 or 20 years with kids and wives to raise who have committed no crime? “
No crime? What part of illegal alien don’t you get?
It is a crime to “enter the country illegally.”
It is NOT a crime to enter the country lawfully and then overstay your visa, or to marry an American citizen and get divorced, to ask for asylum and not get it, to fail to fill out your immigration paperwork correctly. Or to live here for thirty years an think you’re a US Citizen because your mom was a citizen only to find that you were born before she was 21, so too bad, so sad. And it is CERTAINLY no crime to be 18 years old, to have been here since you were 1, and you were brought here before you could talk.
There are a ton of people who are “out of status” who are not “criminals.” Not everybody out of status is a drug dealer in the back of a tire truck. Of course, that may not fit the picture. Well, maybe it’s time to expand the picture a little bit.